In the current information age, there are often discussions of the desirableness of a paperless society. However, notwithstanding such discussions, there remains a great need by users of computers and other information terminals (that is, any of various devices from which a user may desire to submit a print job, such as personal computers, notebook computers, workstation computers, tablet computers, smartphones, PDAs, other information appliances, kiosks, etc.) for printing functionality. Thus, peripheral devices having printing or plotting functionality, such as printers, copiers, multi-function devices, etc., continue to play a significant role in information technology (IT) at home and at work.
Further, many users today carry one or more mobile terminals (such as notebook computers, tablet computers, smartphones, PDAs, etc.) with them and have an expectation of access to other IT provisions, while the user is on-the-go (e.g., away from home and office), even when the user is not familiar with, and/or in which the user is unaware of, the IT resources available to the user in that environment.
Typically, to print from a terminal to a printer, a device driver, specific to such printer, must be installed on the terminal. Such process typically needs to be performed through administrative login, which allows the logged-in user to perform various tasks, such as open a port on the terminal, find the host address of the printer and perform associations between the terminal and the printer. In a home environment, this requirement is typically not a large burden, since there is usually no more than one printer, or occasionally two printing devices, and the person installing such printer in, or permitting other devices access to, the home network performs such tasks only a limited number of times.
However, in an enterprise environment, or another network environment in which there are dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of devices, a system or network administrator is typically required, to control access by the multitude of devices to various resources on the network. In such circumstances, the ordinary user is often (by policy) not permitted to arbitrarily install programs on the user's terminal which might open a gateway for unauthorized entry into the network environment. Thus, installation of software, such as device drivers, is usually required to be performed by an administrator. On the other hand, the administrator of such an IT environment which contains numerous printers and other peripheral devices may find that much time is spent installing drivers for the peripheral devices, and in a case that there is a large number of users in the IT environment, such burden becomes even more pronounced.
In some environments, the print system is configured for the terminal to submit the print job to a print server and not directly to a printer, and the print server, in lieu of the terminal, is configured via the appropriate print driver to communicate with the printer. In this case, the user terminal merely needs to be configured to submit print jobs to the print server and is not required to have device drivers installed thereon for each printer to which print jobs may be submitted. However, in such arrangement, a large number of print servers may be needed, because of the number of users and number of printers, in order to process the large number of print jobs that may need to be processed, in an acceptable amount of time. The greater the number of print servers, the more administration and maintenance required from the administrator(s).
There is a need for an improved approach for a user to have access conveniently to a large number of printers.